You and I both know when it comes to hosting a stellar website, content is King. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write 100 percent of your content by yourself. Writing high quality, original content on a consistent basis takes a lot of time and effort and is difficult to keep up with.
However, providing quality content on a consistent basis is extremely important to your followers, who check for regular content, and for SEO, since site activity is one of the main ranking criteria used. Relying solely on original content that you personally write might sound like a great goal, but it carries with it the likelihood that gaps in your writing and posting will occur. This is not a beneficial long-term solution. You can fill these gaps by utilizing content curation!
What is content curation you might ask? Contrary to content creation (which sounds almost the same) where you only produce your own contents, you instead incorporate contents from external sources that you personally aggregate or curate to provide a wealth of consistent content for your site. While content curation may sound like a daunting task, it actually consists of three simple steps: Content Aggregation, Value-adding, and Sharing.
The first step to creating a site filled with powerful content is to aggregate, or discover, that content. However, simply searching for information online is not good enough. The Internet is saturated with far too much information. While there’s plenty of information available on just about every subject you can think of, traditional manual searching, such as Googling, takes a lot of time. Even after all the time and effort you put in to find information, chance are still good that you’ll wind up with information that’s outdated, of poor quality, or in the wrong format.
Content aggregation tools exist to help you sift through the junk and develop a stream of relevant, high quality, and timely content that your audience will love and search engines will respond positively to. Content curation tools typically include a content aggregation feature, which helps you automatically find content for your site. Standalone news feeds also exist, such as Buzzsumo and Meltwater, which are excellent tools to add to your pool of content curation resources.
Content aggregation provide you with a constant stream of related, fresh news from all over the Internet. These informational links are sent to you based on the keywords you provide. Sometimes content aggregation is all you need in order to sift through the sea of content available online and find the snippets of information your audience will love. At this point, you can choose to manually upload the content you found to your website. A lot of these tools can be used for free but is limited in certain ways (limited number of search stream or results) compared to paid version, but usually enough to cover the basic content discovery needs,
Curating a wealth of relevant, useful, and timely information is just the first step in a solid content curation strategy. The next step is to contribute with your own personal touch. Adding your insight to the content you’ve curated allows you to communicate your stance on the subject with your audience. It also provides you with an excellent opportunity to share additional information you know about the topic at hand. Commenting on the pieces of content you share also gives them added value.
Furthermore, it demonstrates to your audience that you genuinely understand the topic and have a deep interest in whatever you’re discussing, not simply clicking the share button on random articles, videos, and pictures. You can also use this platform to suggest further links to your audience, so those who want to explore the topic in further detail can do so. It’s important to consistently share the right kind of information, as well as provide useful insights in addition to the content itself. Predicting future trends, explaining things the article missed or only covered vaguely, and providing your personal experience are all great ways to add value to the content you post and stand out as an expert in your field.
The final step in creating a fantastic website full of a consistent stream of engaging content is to share that content and spark community involvement. You do have the option of sharing your content manually, but most of the time you’ll want to use the features provided to you by the content curation platform of your choice that assist you with automatic sharing. Among the most useful of these tools is the one that allows you to share your aggregated content to multiple platforms all at the same time. If your business runs several social media accounts across the same or multiple platforms, this feature is particularly useful. You can also use this tool to share your curated content on your own blog, email newsletter, and other websites at the same time, which increases efficiency and creates a consistent theme across all your online platforms.
Another highly useful feature of content curation platforms is the scheduling feature. Using this feature you can schedule the sharing of your various pieces of curated content, and you can automate when those shares happen. This is particularly useful if you cater to a particular audience in a different time zone, or have specific needs for when your clients do and don’t want to receive notifications. Scheduling also comes in handy when combined with analytics. Using the information you receive from your analytics reports, you can see when your audience members are most active online and schedule your posts during those hours. This will help you reach your main audience right when they’re using their social media accounts, which can drive traffic, shares, views, and sales.
You can even go so far as to prepare and schedule content for the entire week or month, all at one time, by scheduling them in one or two blocks of time. This helps you prepare for holidays, plan a strategy behind your content, and free up the rest of your time for other important business tasks.
Social media is an excellent tool for sharing your curated content. However, content curation should go far beyond simply posting everything piece of content on your website and leaving it at that. Even after you engage with your content, you need to be aware of a few things when posting on social media.
The social media “rule of threes” or “rule of thirds” is a good rule to go by to ensure that your social media streams don’t become a never-ending list of sales pitches and content links.
The First Third – The first third of your social media marketing should be geared toward promoting your business, converting your audience, and otherwise generating profit and making money. This third is the “sales” third of your social media activity.
The Second Third – The second third of your social media activity should be designed to share content, which is the third that will integrate most closely with your content curation efforts. Sharing stories, articles, and other media is included in this third.
The Final Third – The last third of your social media efforts should be focused solely on building relationships with your audience. This third is where you’ll reply to comments on your content, thank readers, and interact with those who are following you.
By integrating your content curation efforts with the rule of thirds, you’ll ensure that your social media outreach and overall marketing platform is solid. It will also help you avoid the pitfall of inundating your readers with too much of one type of post or content, keeping your web presence fresh and relevant.
Some of the top content curation tools you can use to help you further your marketing efforts, draw in new readers, and keep your site relevant are as the following:
Scoop.it – One of my favorite content curation tools – Scoop.it features one of the best content aggregation function that lets you use multiple keywords to discover contents and the results are updated in real-time. You can also follow other users who curate similar topic as yours to get ideas on what to share. Signing up is pretty convenient – just by using your Facebook or Twitter account you can start using the service for free, albeit with less (but enough) function than the paid version.
Hootsuite – Hootsuite is a great tool to use because you can curate content using its content curation tool, and you can also schedule posts. Taking an hour or two to schedule a week of posts across all your social media sites is a great way to save time in the long run, and Hootsuite allows you to do that using a streamlined dashboard that’s easy to manage. You could effectively run all of your social media through Hootsuite’s platform without ever logging into your social media sites individually again.
Curation Suite – Curation Suite is another great tool you can use to specifically focus on content curation. While Hootsuite focuses more on managing your social media streams, CurationSuite helps you curate a large amount of high quality content that you can use to keep your readers engaged and active. They just added a new feature called the Listening Engine, which “listens in” to your social media followers and provides content suggestions based on what they’re talking about.
Storify – If your audience is more apt to seek out long-form content, like long articles and stories, Storify offers a great solution for you. Instead of aggregating and curating shorter links and pieces of content, Storify helps you craft a story with long-form content that keeps readers engaged and coming back for more.
No matter which content curation platform you choose to use, keep in mind that the goal is to curate content that is relevant and useful to your readers. So much content exists that it’s easy to get caught up in what sounds interesting to you, instead of focusing on what your audience will come back for again and again. Using these tools is a great benefit to you, because it provides you with an efficient system for delivering consistent, high-quality content, and benefits your audience because they’re receiving the content they want on a regular basis. This combination of characteristics allows you to become an expert and a thought leader in your field in the eyes of your clientele, building trust and cultivating long-term customers and loyal fans.
Updated: 11/6/15
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